747 
No. 145.] 
sects, but the past year they came from the ground among such 
trees as abundantly as in the original timber lands. It has been 
commonly supposed heretofore that the larvae derive their nourish¬ 
ment from the root 3 of the trees upon which the eggs were de¬ 
posited, punctuiing the bark with their beaks and extracting the 
juices, and in this way it has been supposed that much greater 
injury was done to the trees ihan by the wounds made upon the 
twigs by the perfect insects. This view has been sustained by 
Miss Margaretta H. Morris, in an interesting communication to 
the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and published also 
in Downing’s Horticulturist (vol. ii. p. 16 j, in which she attributes 
the failure of pear and other fruit trees, in many cases, to the 
exhaustion of the sap, produced by these larvse fixing themselves 
upon the roots. On examining a pear tree which had ceased to 
thrive, she found that all those roots which were six inches or 
more beneath the surface were thronged with countless numbers 
of the larvae, clinging to them by means of their beaks inserted 
in the bark. From one root, a, yard irf length and about an inch 
in diameter, she gathered twenty-three larvae, varying in length 
from a quarter of an inch to an inch—a much greater disparity in 
size than fcould have been anticipated in larvae which were all of 
the same age. 
The habits and nourishment of these larvae is a topic which 
needs further investigation. Mr. R. W. Kennicott, oi West 
North field, Illinois, writes me that in the month of November in 
following down the roots of several trees and shrubs, the twigs of 
which were badly cut to pieces by the locusts last year, to the 
distance of a foot or more, he was unable to find a single one of 
these grubs, a strong indication that whfen young they descend 
deeper than Miss Morris supposes. And a more important fact 
is, that they subsist upon the roots of grass and herbs as well as 
those of trees. I learn from Dr. J. W. Moody that at Spring 
Arbor, Jackson county, Michigan, in fields which had been 
cleared of their timber some sixteen years, and which have been 
under cultivation most of the time since, the locusts came forth 
last June as plentifully as in the timber land; and these seemed 
to have been equally as well nourished, for they were of the same 
